You instinctively want to sell, to get out of the market before it collapses.

Similarly, when markets soar, watching the likes of CNBC can fire up the reflexive nucleus accumbens in your brain.

Suddenly you’re excited at the prospect of big gains and you start to convince yourself that you need to buy, to pile in now before the opportunity passes.

These are natural instincts that serve us well in other areas of our lives.

But almost always, for investors who have the right investment strategy in place, the best course of action is inaction.

In that sense, financial television can be very harmful.

Also, these channels love their pundits — people who claim to be able to forecast future price movements, and to know which stocks, sectors and funds are tipped to outperform.

Again, the evidence shows that the track record of financial media pundits is dreadful, and that all such tips and forecasts are best ignored.

What about newspapers and magazines?

Well, think about how those publications are funded.

Without advertising revenue from asset managers and fund retailers, most newspaper money sections and investment magazines wouldn’t even exist.

However principled individual journalists may be, however determined to protect editorial independence, it’s very hard in the real world to bite the hand that feeds you.

The fund houses, of course, are all too aware of the clout that journalists have, and the benefit of having reporters write in positive terms about their products.

So, for instance, they fund glitzy awards nights where the winners are often the journalists and publications who’ve been the most “on-message”; they also offer journalists expensive lunches, tickets to sporting events and even junkets overseas.

How much impact all this has is very difficult to say, but it raises important questions.

In particular, what is the benefit for end investors?

After all, they’re the ones, ultimately, who are picking up the bill.

But there’s another, and perhaps even bigger, conflict of interest to consider.

The financial media relies on the fund industry not just for the revenue it provides, but also because, without it, there would be precious little to write about.

The fund industry knows there’s an insatiable demand for news and comment, and with active fund management, there’s always something new to write about — new funds, new managers, new trends and so on.

So fund houses pay PR agencies to produce a constant stream of “stories”, many of which end up in print.

Indeed, with editorial budgets increasingly stretched, and ever smaller teams of journalists having to churn more and more material, it’s noticeable that some stories contain passages that have simply been cut and pasted from a press release.

So, what are the lessons to learn for investors?

In short, they need to become much more discerning consumers of financial media.

Whenever you read an article that tempts you to act, always ask yourself